Paul Krugman

As we approach the midterm elections, most political coverage I see frames the contest as a struggle between Republicans taking advantage of a bad economy and Democrats trying to scare voters about the G.O.P.’s regressive social agenda. Voters do, indeed, perceive a bad economy. But perceptions don…

The big economic news of the week was, of course, Thursday’s report on consumer prices. And there’s no way to spin that report: It was ugly. There has been a lot of buzz from private-sector observers to the effect that inflation is rolling over, but there was no sign of that in the official numbers…

Meteorologists tell us that global warming has created new problems for forecasters. Not only are hurricanes getting stronger, they’re also intensifying more rapidly than they used to, making it difficult to issue early warnings for communities in their path. Notably, officials in Florida’s Lee…

When you’re telling stories about the economy, housing almost always looms large. It plays a huge role in the economy’s ups and downs: A burst housing bubble was the prime mover in the Great Recession of 2007-9, and the Federal Reserve’s leverage over the economy comes largely from the influence of…

The West isn’t exactly at war with Russia. However, it isn’t exactly not at war, either. Western weapons have helped Ukraine to stall Russia’s invasion and even to counterattack, while Western economic sanctions have clearly created serious problems for Russian industry. Russia has retaliated…

Most articles on the death of Mikhail Gorbachev dwell on the political failure of his reform project. The Russian Federation, the main successor state to the Soviet Union, has not, to say the least, become a democratic, open society. Ukraine may finally have gotten there, but that very success is…

Four decades ago I spent a year working in the US government, on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers. (For those wondering: Yes, this was the Reagan administration; no, I wasn’t a Republican.) It was a technocratic job. I was the chief international economist; the chief domestic…

Not long ago, many people were predicting a long, hot summer of inflation. To their surprise — and, for some Republicans, dismay — that isn’t happening. Overall consumer prices were flat in July, and nowcasts — estimates based on preliminary data — suggest that inflation will remain low in August. …

There’s something strange in the D.C. air these days. It smells a bit like … competence. Seriously, it has been amazing to watch the media narrative on the Biden administration change. Just a few weeks ago President Biden was portrayed as hapless, on the edge of presiding over a failed…

In 1990 Congress passed an amendment to the Clean Air Act of 1970, among other things taking action against acid rain, urban smog and ozone. The legislation was highly successful, greatly reducing pollution at far lower cost than business interest groups had predicted. I sometimes see people…